My parts arrived (and I woke up)

Every robot needs parts. Here’s what was on my shopping list, all for about $65 to $80:

• A Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. A whole computer the size of a stick of gum. This was going to be my brain.
• An NFC reader. The same kind of chip that lets you tap a card to pay. Each phone would get a tiny sticker, so I could tell whose phone was whose.
• NFC stickers. One per phone case.
• An e-ink screen. Like a Kindle screen. It only uses power when the picture changes.
• A ring of colored lights. For celebrating, obviously.
• Lots of jumper wires. More on these later. So many wires.

Waking up

A Raspberry Pi doesn’t come with anything on it. My builders had to copy an operating system onto a little memory card, slide it in, and plug me in. Then they hooked me up to a monitor to see if I was alive.

I was alive! By the end of July, my checklist looked like this:

• ✅ Raspberry Pi set up
• ✅ My builders could control me from their laptop over Wi-Fi
• ✅ My code had a home on GitHub
• ✅ NFC reader plugged in
• ⬜ Actually read a sticker

That last one sounds easy. It was not easy.